How would you calculate or consider this precast concrete wall system supported by columns?

[NorwegianEngineer]

Hello everyone,

I just started on a project which have precast concrete walls supported on columns. Please see attached picture. The concrete walls support hollow core slabs on both sides with fairly large spans (not shown on picture) leading to fairly high loads on this structure (around 3-4000 kN on each end of the bottom wall).

At first, I wanted only the bottom wall to act as a simply supported beam carrying the walls on top as a distributed load, but due to very high loads, I decided that every wall in this system will be a simply supported beam with a 2 m loading area in each end. 2 m is chosen as that's approximately what's required to handle the compressive forces throughout the joint with hollow core slabs.

So, for calculating this, I will 1) consider a 2 m column at each wall end; 2) a simply supported beam. Two separate calculations as the wall will act both as a column and a beam.

For the bottom wall, it seemed logical to me to consider each end as an 800 mm column - similar sized to the column supporting it. But a colleague thinks this is too conservative leading to fairly high amounts of rebar and that I could consider the bottom wall with a 1500 mm column in each end. I discussed it with another colleague, too, but have not received satisfactory answers for what's the correct way to consider this. Personally, I tend to err on the side of caution, but maybe I'm in the wrong on this one.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

 

[NorwegianEngineer]

Hello everyone,

The project was now completed with my conservative solution, but it's been a subject of discussion at the office and I can't say we seem to be in agreement on what's the right solution here for the column size at the bottom.

To be honest, I feel that's common in engineering. At least in my firm. If you ask five different senior engineers you can be certain you'll get five different answers.

I'm re-attaching the picture from the original post as it didn't seem like it attached properly.